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Following the runaway success of the slim and powerful MacBook Air, PC manufacturers have finally arrived on the scene with their own blade-thin models. The Asus Zenbook is one of the first compelling "ultrabooks" and certainly the most striking, with a brushed metal body and clean lines. The 11-inch Core i7 we tested is also cheaper than the MacBook Air.

While we found the performance of the Zenbook to be unfaltering, it does fall short in a few areas like screen and sound quality. But in one key respect it absolutely falls down hard: the trackpad is fickle and barely functional, to the point that using the Zenbook as a primary traveling work machine caused us a good deal of frustration.

Asus "The Body" Zenbook

11-inch Zenbook base model

$999

11-inch Zenbook reviewed

$1,199

Highest-end 13-inch Zenbook

$1,499

The Zenbook is made almost entirely of brushed or anodized aluminum, with a few darker accents of metal and plastic (the frame around the screen and the surface in which the keyboard is inlaid are both dark plastic). The computer vents heat under the screen through slots in the hinge, which is also entirely metal. While Apple's MacBook Air uses a strip of plastic in the hinge to help the computer better pick up WiFi signals, we didn't notice any signal problems with the Zenbooks.

Edges and corners of the Zenbook are sharp, though the body is low-profile enough that we didn't have a problem with the edges digging into our wrists. The underside of the computer is slightly curved, and the computer can get pretty warm on the underside during moderate to heavy use. The area near the vents under the screen gets near-scalding hot while editing images.

The Zenbook's vent and scripted logo below the screen

The anodized metal keys of the Zenbook.

Other than the feet, the feel of the Zenbook is quite sturdy. No parts of the notebook squeak or creak or flex, and it felt like the expensive machine it is when I used it (so long as the heel of my right palm on the palmrest didn't rock it).

Whenever I would open the Zenbook, it was a toss-up whether the screen would lift smoothly away from the rest of the computer or would have to be prised apart like an oyster. If the hinge had been loosened up earlier in the day and we had opened and closed the computer a few times, it was easier to open and the bottom half would remain stable on a surface. If it had been a day or two since the computer was opened, we'd have to work a fingernail under the nub along the top edge to pry it open.

Once open, the body of the Zenbook is balanced relative to the weight of the screen. We could tip the display all the way back without the computer tipping with it. The profile of the computer is thin, measuring 9 millimeters at its thickest point and weighing only 2.43 lbs, thinner but heavier than the same size MacBook Air. The computer comes with a brown nylon and leather sleeve that snaps closed, which makes it easy to just throw in a bag and go (we hope you like brown envelope-style cases).

Only a handful of ports are on the Zenbook: a DC power jack, USB 3.0, and micro-HDMI on the right, and USB 2.0, miniVGA, and headphone jack on the left, and included in the box are a USB-to-Ethernet adapter and a miniVGA-to-VGA adapter. The ports are sufficiently spaced and we had no issue plugging things in next to one another.

The Zenbook's provided case. Hey, it's free!

The left side of the Zenbook, with miniVGA, USB 2.0, and audio out ports.

The Zenbook's right side, with microHDMI, USB 3.0, and power ports.

The screen on the 11-inch Zenbook is 1366x768 resolution, the same as the 11 inch MacBook Air. While it's not a bad level of detail, we found that the colors on the screen were a bit undersaturated compared to the Air, noticeably so for the moderate amount of image-editing and movie-watching we do in a day.

A demonstration of the Zenbook's many wonders and quirks, with some comparisons to the MacBook Air.

Screen, camera, power, sound

The Zenbook's screen has a wide horizontal viewing angle with only a very minor amount of lightening as you turn it to the right or left. The blacks on the monitor look very black indeed, possibly because the bezel is more of a dark gray. But on the other axis, the screen is not lit evenly, with the bottom half lighter than the top half at reasonable angles, unless you tilt it so far as to distort the colors altogether. In direct sunlight, the screen is as good as any we've seen on a laptop.

The Zenbook's webcam allows you to see that I am human, but little else.

A camera is embedded above the Zenbook's display, and at 0.3 megapixels it is predictably horrible like pretty much every other built-in front-facing camera. You can make out blobs of color shifting in front of it. The default application is likewise sad and unintuitive. Fortunately, many application alternatives for both video-chatting and vanity picture-taking/dailybooth-ing do exist.

The power brick that comes with the Zenbook is a small black box with flip-out prongs, so it doesn't add much weight or bulk to the computer if you're taking it along on a trip. Unlike most power cords you'll see with laptops, the Zenbook's is all one piece, a long (eight-foot) wire running from the small black box that terminates in a DC jack. A velcro strip is attached to the cable as a management solution.

The underside of the Zenbook and its mercifully small power brick with long, unruly cord.

One of the Bang and Olufsen speakers on the underside of the Zenbook

One of the feet that holds the Zenbook up so high. They arrived noticeably uneven.

The external speakers, from Bang & Olufsen, are embedded in slots in the bottom of the computer as it curves up on the left and right sides. We found them to be quite loud, especially because the positioning takes advantage of whatever surface the computer is sitting on to serve as a reflector, but the quality wasn't a standout. Both the speakers and headphone jack lack depth and sound tinny, and at the loudest volumes some distortion is audible. We tested them against the MacBook Air, whose speakers are no prize either, and found the Zenbook's speakers to be slightly worse in the tinniness department, but not by much.

Pain, anguish: the trackpad

The Zenbook's large, wide trackpad appears to be metal coated in a layer of plastic. A small black line separates right and left clicks, though you can left-click over most of the surface of the trackpad. Normal pointing and clicking tasks, or tapping to click, read fine on the trackpad.

But when it comes to any other routine task, like right clicking or dragging and dropping, the Zenbook's trackpad is less predictable than a teenager. If Elizabeth Taylor were alive, she would ask why it can't settle down. The problem is partly Asus' ham-handed attempt at implementing multitouch gestures, but even with those turned off, having two fingers on the trackpad at the same time confuses the heck out of it.

Dragging and dropping is particularly infuriating. Once you put that second finger on the trackpad, the trackpad almost immediately forgets which finger clicked and which showed up to drag; often, the cursor will jump across the screen to the finger you just put down to drag. It will display the same confusion if you leave your navigating finger down while clicking with another finger. Like the Apple Mighty Mouse's famous need for your left finger to lift when you want to right click, this trackpad will struggle over clicks with more than one finger involved.

An exercise in frustration.

Some people will use both hands on a trackpad at once (one index finger to navigate, the other to click) and those people might experience slightly less trouble with this. Likewise, tapping the trackpad to click rather than using the mouse button can mitigate the problem.

The Zenbook's trackpad is capable of some of the multitouch gestures found in Apple's trackpads: you can use two fingers to scroll up or down, and drag fingers apart or together to zoom in or out. But the trackpad is confused by these gestures, too. It can take a few two-finger tries to get the computer to realize you're trying to scroll, and even the slightest spreading or narrowing of the distance between your fingers will result in whatever you're looking at becoming immense or tiny. There are some other two- and three-finger gestures, but you can't calibrate any of them, something this feature badly needs; all you can do is turn them on or off.

The trackpad is split at the bottom into traditional right- and left-click buttons, but you can click on most of the trackpad (like Apple's trackpads, the further away from the bottom the trackpad you click, the more resistance there is). Most of the trackpad will interpret your click as a left-click, unless you get too close to the right button area or have whatever combination of fingers down that makes the trackpad interpret it as a right click.

The thin black line that separates your left click from your right click. Or, it should, anyway.

Sometimes the unpredictability of the trackpad crosses over from annoying to just plain dangerous. A few times while writing articles a misinterpreted click made the cursor end up where I wasn't expecting it to be and do something crazy like highlight a block of text. If I didn't realize what happened and kept typing, poof, there goes the block of text. I could undo and so on, but I've just never seen an input device make so many tasks go awry.

A setting for the trackpad ("Finger Sensing Pad" in Asus software lingo) is supposed to prevent accidental brushes and bumps from getting picked up, but we found that most of the accidental brushes while typing would be interpreted as real gestures anyway.

When we disabled all of the multitouch gestures in the Finger Sensing Pad Settings (13 separate checkboxes), the trackpad became confused less often. The pointer did still sometimes jump from point to point or accidentally right-click, but it wasn't nearly as bad. For sanity's sake, everyone who gets this computer should turn off all multitouch inputs, immediately. Otherwise I give you a maximum of two days before you claw the trackpad out of its socket, bury it under the floorboards, and run screaming into the night.

It’s sad that the Zenbook can’t pull off two-finger scrolling, at least. Every computer in the world should have two finger scrolling, because it means lefties don’t have to crank their thumbs backwards to hold down the mouse button while dragging another finger, and no one is tempted to use two hands.

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Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston